Bees bring new buzz to Capitol Hill

Can the farm bill help save the bees? Can the bees help save the farm bill from itself?

It’s an only-in-Washington drama that opens Tuesday and Wednesday as the Senate and House agriculture committees mark up their new five-year plans, which are worth tens of billions of dollars to American farmers over the next decade.

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The powerful crop insurance industry and old-line commodity lobbies like rice, cotton and corn will be at the table defending their share. But the big newcomer is the bee, which has been disappearing in record numbers and become a symbol of much that is haywire in the current system.

Indeed, the number of honeybee colonies in the U.S. fell by nearly a third this past winter according to government data released last week. That’s a big jump from the prior winter and the latest evidence of a steady decline that recently led Europe to impose new pesticide restrictions — alarming corporations like Germany’s Bayer AG with major operations in the U.S.

Native American bees as well as the honeybee — more often used in managed pollination — are affected, and the threat to agriculture is real. Billions in annual farm income could be lost given the bee’s importance to scores of specialty crops from tomato and pumpkin patches to fruit trees and California’s almond industry.

Most important politically, the bee’s plight puts a face — or stinger — on long-standing complaints about the insular nature of Washington’s approach to farm policy.

“I consider it one of the world’s very crucial issues, I mean that most sincerely,” said Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.), that rare combination, a former zoology student with a seat on the House Rules Committee. “If you don’t have no bees, you don’t have no food.”

“If you held a pistol on me, I couldn’t name you a beekeeper,” Hastings told POLITICO. “My interest is if we don’t do something, we’re going to end up with major problems down the road. And I’m also surprised with major agricultural interests, the agribusinesses. I don’t understand their failure to just weigh in in this particular matter.”

Hastings helped raise the alarm in the 2008 farm bill when he used his position on the rules panel to insert language intended to help bees and other pollinators by promoting more forage and authorizing $20 million in annual research.

The forage efforts, led by the Natural Resources Conservation Service, have had some real success. But the dollars and reach of the NRCS are limited. And proponents complain that little of the research money ever materialized even as Washington paid out close to $7 billion last year to help subsidize the premiums charged farmers on their crop insurance.